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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23636455">Lines in the Sand</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnTreader2016/pseuds/DawnTreader2016'>DawnTreader2016</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Em Família | Helena's Shadow (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Clarina, F/F, Femslash, Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 19:49:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,097</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23636455</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnTreader2016/pseuds/DawnTreader2016</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara was losing the battle with herself. She'd been drawing lines in the sand, trying to stop herself from throwing abandon into the wind and following her heart. If she stayed behind the line, she could keep control of the situation and her attraction to Marina. But the problem with lines in the sand is they're not permanent, and she was already on her sixth line. A Clarina fic.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Clara Fernandes/Marina Meirelles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Lines in the Sand</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Yay! My first fanfic! Please enjoy.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You have no idea what’s in my head at this moment.” Marina laughed. She’d had too much wine, or else was drunk on the heady ambiance of the room, and Clara worried if she got any louder, the guests would turn and look at her.</p><p>Clara waved her off, smiling. “Pssssh. No, no, behave yourself.” It was a light scold, but her family was here. Free talk like this could get them in trouble, even though many people in the room already knew what was happening between them. And, she had to admit, the ones who didn’t know might be able to figure it out just by looking at them. As she had pointed out to Marina weeks before, the chemistry they shared was palpable. Anyone walking through the space between them might think they’d walked into an electrical storm.</p><p>“Aw, I have to behave?” Marina smiled impishly. She was like a teenager, pushing to see how far Clara would let her go.</p><p>No, not you. “Yes.”</p><p>“I don’t want to behave. But I’m not ashamed to speak like that, you know why? Because I think only beautiful things, the way I see you.” It was a challenge. She was daring Clara to want to know more.</p><p>Clara did, of course, as Marina knew she would. “Then tell me—without censoring—what happens in your mind.”</p><p>Marina’s eyes shone. “Really? You want me to tell you?”</p><p>Tell me everything. “Mmhmm.”</p><p>“Well then I will.”</p><p>* * *</p><p>Clara Fernandes was losing the battle with herself. If she was honest, she’d already lost a long time ago. For the past few months, ever since meeting Marina Meirelles, she’d been drawing lines in the sand, trying to stop herself from throwing abandon into the wind and following her heart. If only she stayed behind the line, she could keep control of the situation. She could keep her husband Cadu and her son Ivan and the life she thought she wanted.  But the problem with lines in the sand is they’re not permanent. They can be moved. Draw the line, erase it, draw a new one. They’re not the firm limits Clara thought they would be when she started drawing them. And she was already on her sixth line.</p><p>And Marina… Marina was like quicksand: no matter how much Clara fought, she was slowly sinking deeper.</p><p>Clara never saw Marina coming. How could she? She’d thought her life was complete. She had her husband, her son, and the life of a housewife that was both her dream and her destiny. Cadu was devastatingly handsome, he was kind, and she could envision her entire life with him. From the moment they’d married, she had assumed they would grow old together. Then she met Marina and her life was turned upside down with the snap of two fingers. No, with the meeting of two pairs of eyes across a room.</p><p>Marina was…a whirlwind. She was glamorous. She was adventurous. She was artistic. She was generous. And unexpectedly, she saw Clara as a person. Someone with the capacity to be more than just a housewife. Someone with an artistic eye and the potential to do great things. Before Marina, Clara had no experience with anything but heterosexuality. She had no lesbian friends and had never considered what it would be like to be pursued by a woman. Plenty of men had made overt innuendo to her about an affair, but a woman? Never.</p><p>Once she overcame her shock at Marina’s interest in her, Clara was flattered. Marina was an internationally recognized photographer. She was gorgeous and rich. She was everything Clara wasn’t. Her attention was a pleasant surprise that seemed both unreal and transient. Marina would quickly become bored with her and Clara would forever keep the amusing, quirky memory of the time Marina flirted with her. But Marina didn’t tire of her. To the contrary, she only became more interested. Her gaze was like a spotlight that followed Clara everywhere she went.</p><p>That’s when Clara drew her first line in the sand. She could be friends with Marina, but Marina had to understand that was all they would ever be. Clara was a heterosexual, after all, with a husband and a son. Marina had graciously recognized this line…but had looked at her in a way that said, “I will do as you say now, but one day, you will choose me.”</p><p>That was when Clara experienced the first tickle of doubt. Because instead of laughing at such a silly idea, something told her it might be true. There was something magnetic about Marina. Clara had never looked at a woman twice, but when her phone rang and she saw Marina’s name in the caller ID, her stomach got butterflies. And when Marina sent her a sultry gaze from across the room, her heart beat faster.</p><p>So she drew a second line in the sand. Since she couldn’t stop Marina from flirting with her, she would limit herself to a minimum of flirting back. After all, it was nice to be flirted with, wasn’t it? And it didn’t hurt anything if the two of them played a little game between themselves. Marina knew Clara was a married heterosexual, and it wasn’t like she was cheating on Cadu. It felt nice to be wanted. If they had chemistry, well, couldn’t there be chemistry between friends like this?</p><p>But Clara quickly she realized this was no game for Marina. Marina was wooing her. And for her part, suddenly she was much less certain of her heterosexuality than she’d been a month ago. When she thought about Marina, she realized her feelings toward her were… Well, if Marina had been a man, she would have said she was falling in love with him.</p><p>So Clara drew a third line, one that no one else could know, not even Marina. She could imagine what it would be like to kiss Marina. She could imagine what it would be like to feel Marina’s lips on hers, to feel Marina’s fingers tangle in her hair and Marina’s hips press against hers. She could imagine Marina’s lips on her neck, or her arms wrapped around her waist…but that was all. She couldn’t want those things, she could only imagine them; passing flickers of thought with no weight behind them, like wondering what it would be like to be an astronaut or a race car driver.</p><p>The problem with Marina, however, was she seemed to always know exactly what Clara was thinking. As though Clara were a book she could read at will. Clara thought she could pinpoint the very day, the very hour when Marina recognized just what Clara had been thinking. She looked at Clara in a way that said, “Invite me in and I will come.” But Clara had been terrified by the offer, so she built a wall to make sure she would never invite Marina in.</p><p>…And then she’d torn the wall down herself, taking a sledgehammer to it. She wasn’t strong enough to leave Marina completely. To forget her and never look back. When she couldn’t see Marina in person, she thought about her constantly. And when Marina had shown up at her door and brazenly declared her love…Clara had known then she was stuck fast in this quicksand.</p><p>So she drew a fourth line: she could imagine everything so long as she didn’t act on that imagination. And imagine she did. She imagined Marina pressing her against the wall, her warm mouth tracing a line down Clara’s neck while her hands slipped up under Clara’s shirt and cupped her breasts. She imagined lying on Marina’s silken bed, grasping Marina’s smooth black hair as her hips rose to meet Marina’s beautiful lips. She imagined her knees around Marina’s ears, her fingers clutching the headboard as her legs shook. She imagined Marina’s long fingers playing across her like a concert pianist. She had more imagination in a week than she’d had in years of marriage. There was no room in Marina’s house for which she hadn’t imagined a dozen or more scenarios, no position she hadn’t fantasized over and over again.</p><p>And that’s when the façade of her heterosexuality had at last crumbled completely. Not just because she had imagined these things alone, her breathing heavy, her fingers doing the things she fantasized Marina would do to her. But also because everything she’d imagined Marina doing to her, she imagined doing back. She imagined pushing Marina onto the table, kissing her chest as her hands slipped inside the band of her underwear. She imagined kissing a trail down Marina’s stomach and feeling the rock of Marina’s hips around her. She imagined what sounds Marina might make and how it would feel to be the one to bring her to release. For a woman who had never dreamed of looking twice at a woman, she had become an expert on all the ways she could touch one, at least in her fantasies.</p><p>And Marina knew all of it, because Marina always knew. Clara couldn’t look at Marina without Marina somehow knowing exactly what she had imagined and when and how often. And the way she looked back at Clara let Clara know she’d already imagined the same and more. And that made it so hard to be near her, because Marina offered a tantalizing promise: “Invite me in and I’ll turn your fantasies into reality.” All Clara had to do was erase the line in the sand.</p><p>So Clara drew a fifth line. They could touch, but not kiss. Marina could kiss her cheek, hold her hand, or caress her skin, but it could never progress to more intimate contact. And that…was playing with fire. All it would take was for the slightest slip and Clara would lose the last shred of control she had. Already, she was lost, even if she refused to admit it. She was too deep into the quicksand. Even if she had wanted to, she couldn’t get out, and she didn’t want to. This line was more a surrender than a bulwark. Every time Marina touched her skin, her body sang like a plucked harp string. It was like they were separated by a soap bubble. If it popped, they would fly into each other’s arms.</p><p>When she drew the sixth and final line in the sand, it was her last stand before the quicksand swallowed her whole: she could admit to Marina everything she felt, saying aloud the words that she had said with her eyes and with her body for months, but she couldn’t act on those feelings. Her husband and son and the life she had expected for herself came first. She could love Marina, but she couldn’t be with her. Like a stack of plates stacked too high, she had tried to find the single point of equilibrium that would keep everything in her life from falling apart. So long as nothing touched it, she could have her emotional affair with Marina without having to abandon her family. But the balance couldn’t hold.</p><p>* * *</p><p>“Really? You want me to tell you?”</p><p>“Mmhmm.”</p><p>“Well then I will.”</p><p>Marina leaned close to her ear and whispered. “I’ve been thinking about you in my bed, my lipstick on your thighs.”</p><p>Clara gasped. Her body flushed with arousal. She could feel Marina’s cheek flex against hers as she smiled at the reaction she got.</p><p>Marina added, “If you’re loud enough, maybe Vanessa will finally stop bothering us.”</p><p>Clara gasped again, then was unable to stifle the smile on her lips as she laughed. She covered her mouth. Blood rushed to her pelvis and her breathing became a little hoarse as her mind imagined what Marina was telling her. It was lucky Marina had told her here. Had they been alone at Marina’s house, her will to resist might have crumbled. Her eyelashes fluttered as another wave of arousal coursed through her. Later, when she was home alone, she would revisit this memory and imagine in meticulous detail everything Marina had implied. As Marina knew she would.</p><p>The sixth line in the sand was a lie she told herself. Perhaps everything after the first line had been a lie, too. The truth was, she had known what the outcome would be for months, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself or anyone else. Sometime soon, the quicksand would pull the last of her down, and then all those lines she’d drawn in the sand would disappear with a gust of wind.</p>
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